‘More or less, thank you. Getting hold of all their names is the worst part.’
‘Get the children to make out nameplates which they can leave out on the desk until you get to know them. Very well, then. To-morrow, as soon as you have called the register and sent the class down to morning assembly, knock on my door and I will give you the invoices. But you will be careful, won’t you? I should be dreadfully sorry if you did anything rash, as it appears poor Miss Faintley must have done.’
The moment she was gone there was a buzz all over the classroom, for, although both teachers had talked very quietly, the elastic-eared young had followed most of the conversation.
‘Now what?’ asked Laura, who had been giving a good lesson until the entrance of the headmistress. The buzz ceased, but one or two hissing whispers went the rounds, and then a voice from the back row said threateningly:
‘Go on, Maisie Dukes! I dare you! You said you would. Now you go on and do it!’
‘What is all this?’ asked Laura, mentally prepared to deal with impudence. A girl in the second row got up, flushed and inclined to giggle. Laura deduced that she was scared.
‘Please, Miss Menzies,’ she said half-hysterically, ‘some of them think you’re a policewoman!’
‘Well, you can assure them that I am not!’ said Laura, grinning. ‘But don’t bank too steeply on that!’
‘Did you read about Miss Faintley in the papers?’ asked a bright-eyed girl from a front desk. ‘We thought anybody what took her place must be a policewoman trying to find out things. That’s what Too Pretty for Prison was about.’
‘Was it? Why don’t you read something decent?’
Howls of protest from the girls and of derision (equally divided between Laura and the girls) from the boys greeted this question. Laura became terse and authoritative, and the lesson continued. But she had broken the thread of it, and her mind was occupied with other matters. She wondered how much the children knew about Miss Faintley. Probably a good deal more than the staff did, since they would have regarded her more dispassionately, less sympathetically (most likely) and were keener observers and more accomplished critics. A pity that she could not talk to them freely. There might be something extremely important to be gained. They might even know which member of the staff was the most likely to have been Miss Faintley’s friend of the telephone-box arrangements. A pity one couldn’t very well ask them!
Another aspect occurred to her. She remembered, from her own schooldays, the capacity of adolescents for imaginative speculation. If these children were inclined to the belief that she was connected with the police it was only a matter of time before they found out that their guess was not so very far from the truth, and once that was established her value to Mrs Bradley as a spy in the school camp would be questionable if not actually non-existent.
Somewhere in the class a languid hand wagged feebly. Startled, Laura came to herself, to discover that while her conscious mind had been occupied with other, and, she felt, graver matters, her subconscious mind had been presenting the class with a résumé of social life in the early eighteenth century, the botany lesson, rather oddly, having hitched itself on to this subject.
‘Well?’ she said, scowling at the hand. Its owner dropped it, rose to her feet and inquired:
‘Did you say copy or coffee?’
‘I said idiot,’ replied Laura. ‘Sit down and attend properly.’ She looked at the clock. ‘Five minutes to put down in your jotting-books a summary of the lesson. Shortest effort has to be read aloud by whoever passes it in.’
The shortest effort ran as follows:
‘The pea and bean are dicotyledons and are often eaten. Queen Anne’s favourite drink was coffee. She built many houses to contain it and these were taken over by George I. He blew a South Sea Bubble and Lloyd’s was floated. It afterwards became a bank. The bank clerks were called underwriters. The top writers sank ships and the underwriters had to pay. They said how much they could afford, and a Lenten bell was rung.’
The author of this essay was asked to remain behind, as she had refused to read it aloud. She confided to Laura that she was shy. She added that she was sorry, but she had to fetch her little brother from the infants’ school. He was not allowed to cross the High Street alone. She spoke reasonably, without impertinence, and finished tearfully, ‘I couldn’t read it out to them boys!’
‘Quite right, too,’ agreed Laura. ‘All right then. Cut along. After all, why should you suffer because I give a rotten lesson?’
‘Hullo, hullo!’ said Mr Tomalin, appearing in Laura’s doorway as the girl hurried out after the others. ‘Been having trouble with Susan Hopkins? She’s an impudent little baggage. You don’t want to put up with any nonsense.’
‘I don’t intend to,’ replied Laura, who considered that it was high time to settle Mr Tomalin’s hash. ‘And if you don’t mind my saying so, will you kindly leave me to manage my own affairs? I am far more capable of dealing with adolescent girls than you are!’
‘Here, here, I say!’ protested Mr Tomalin, indicating the cupboard monitors.
‘Go and say it somewhere else,’ retorted Laura. She turned and began to put her books into her desk. She had behaved with impropriety, she knew; if she had not known, stifled giggles and whispers from the cupboard would have told her. ‘I shall never make a teacher,’ she told Mrs Bradley that evening in the Stone House, to which she had driven as soon as school was over. Mrs Bradley, however, was well satisfied. Laura had established one important point and had made a valuable contact. It seemed almost certain that Miss Faintley’s correspondent on the telephone had been a member of the school staff, and Laura was already in a position to test for herself, in circumstances which could scarcely arouse suspicion, the relationship, if there was one, between the school parcels and those of less orthodox character which Miss Faintley had collected from Hagford Junction.
Mrs Bradley did not agree with Laura that anything would have been gained if the schoolchildren could be questioned about Miss Faintley.
‘All you would acquire,’ she said, with her crocodile grin, ‘would be a scurrilous suggestion from the boys that Miss Faintley was a victim of “maiden virtue rudely strumpeted” and from the girls the equally romantic theory that her boyfriend killed her in a fit of jealousy. All these children read such Sunday papers as specialize in these matters.’
‘Yes, I suppose they do. Incidentally, I’m by way of making an enemy on the staff. That man Tomalin. I bit his head off to-day for not minding his own business. He’s had the impudence to try to keep order for me and to impress upon me not to stand cheek from the kids.’
‘Misdirected chivalry, don’t you think?’
‘No, I don’t! I know it isn’t. It’s just sheer showing off and nosey-parkering. He’s a washout himself and his only way of trying to prove that he isn’t is this attitude of pretending that other people are even more inefficient than he is! He gets under my skin!’
‘A waste of nervous energy on your part, dear child. Besides, a sense of inferiority and a disappointing professional life are not calculated to bring out the best in any man.’
‘That’s all very well!’ retorted Laura, looking in the mirror at her own flushed face and beginning to laugh. ‘You don’t have to put up with him! I do!’